Mac M1 Running out of Memory on Fusion

Hey guys , I've just got into DaVinci Resolve.

When I play a clip on fusion that has some kind of effects, My mac after about 3 minutes of continuously playing the clip displays an error "Your system has run out of application memory"

Do you guys have any explanation of what's actually going on ?

I don't know if this info is relevant or not , but I have a 1 TB External SSD. Might that relieve the issue ?

About this Mac:
Macbook Pro M1 Chip
Ram:8GB
Storage:134 Gb available of 245 GB

8GB is really small for Fusion. It's incredible that the system is able to load so much/ so fast onto the SSD in the first place.
You might want to watch out as there have been reports of SSDs quickly deteriorating in the new M1 macs because they have to use the SSD very quickly for memory. RAM and VRAM are shared, too.

Minimum specs for Fusion are usually 32GB RAM.

That being said, if you are playing the clip fine on loop and suddenly it stops because the memory is full, then this could potentially show a memory leak, or memory clearing issues. Resolve and Fusion Studio do have known issues (or at least many reports) with clearing VRAM.

Edit: in that case you should prepare a bug report for Blackmagic, including a Resolve log.

If you are using Resolve Studio, you might want to use Fusion Studio (the standalone version) instead. You'll clear some overhead from the rest of resolve and gain a little stability. You'll loose the Render cache, but you should have about 30% more memory available without Resolve.

Agree on the ssd wear and tear.

watch this vid from professional apple repair man:

My fav comment is :
Soldering an ssd is like welding spark plugs to an engine. Disgusting.

yeah the current crop of M1s are underpowered with RAM and GPU especially with the shared memory bs they are peddling.. Never buy a 1st gen apple anything.

yeah the current crop of M1s are underpowered with RAM and GPU especially with the shared memory bs they are peddling.. Never buy a 1st gen apple anything.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the shared memory concept; it is essentially a repackaging of the same thing SGI was doing with the Unified Memory Architecture on their O2 series workstations some years ago.

In the case of SGI they were using very expensive multi-ported RAM external to the CPU/GPU/etc. chips, but virtually everything on the system leveraged the same pool of RAM, eliminating a lot of the separate buffers that normal hardware would have. Expensive, but it worked and it was fast (for its time).

I'm not sure if Apple is using multi-ported RAM on their chips (in which case the seemingly small amount of RAM makes sense due to the high cost) or if they are using some fancy synchronization techniques with something a bit more "normal", but either way the idea of sharing the memory directly between the devices is perfectly reasonable, eliminating much of the need to copy blocks of data around while working.

For many users the 16 GB offering will be sufficient (even the 8 GB will work for some), but people on this forum are generally using high-end video software and are not "most users", thus the reason why Apple has only really rolled this out on their entry-level systems so far.

I would estimate that the M1 chips are quite perfect for many pro audio use cases (the main holdout being for those working with massive sample libraries such as in orchestration), but they will not hold up as well to pro video work. For that we should wait for the next iteration of Apple Silicon (whether that is M1X or M2 or whatever) which is expanded into higher-end GPU offerings and I certainly hope more memory.

I'm hoping to hear something about that in WWDC in June... time will tell.